Rating: 
Summary: Good, but not great.
Review: This is the story of the history behind the development of IBM's "Deep Blue" computer and its 1997 match against Garry Kasparov. We start in the mid-1980s with some of the happenings at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and how the author got drawn into this saga. After describing his thought process on why the design behind the top chess computer at CMU did not make sense, and how he developed his own chip, the author describes the initial successes and failures of that machine (ChipTest). This is the best part of the book as we are priviliged to much detail about the development and the author's as well the reader's anticipation level is kept high. The rest of the book is somewhat downhill as we are not privy to additional interesting details behind the transition from ChipTest to Deep Thought. Also, when ChipTest was being developed the author didn't have anything to lose--once the author had ChipTest the stakes were higher--and the narration takes on a bit of a defensive tone (not outright defensive, but we can read it between the lines).Anyway, my interest in chess is revived thanks to reading this book--I am playing again with friends and have also lined up a couple of books on improving my game in my Amazon[.com] shopping cart.
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